The Cost of Building Software Is Going to Zero

A LinkedIn post by Kirill Eremenko (SuperDataScience), reacting to a story Chip Huyen shared on the SuperDataScience podcast.

Chip Huyen built a tiny tool for herself.

It scans GitHub every day, ranks the most interesting new repos by topic, and tells her why each one matters. Nothing fancy. Just something that made her own life a little easier.

She posted it online. 300,000 views in a week. And the very next day, someone [had rebuilt it].

Chip Huyen — AI engineer and author of AI Engineering, the most-read title on O’Reilly’s entire platform in 2025 — shared this on the SuperDataScience Podcast.

• Full episode: superdatascience.com/999

Discussion

The comments pushed back on the headline:

• Refat Ametov: “The cost of generating code is going to zero. That’s not the same as the cost of building software. Getting something to work reliably in production, handle edge cases, stay maintained, not introduce security vulnerabilities, survive dependency changes — that cost isn’t moving much.”
• Grzegorz Sowa: “When the cost of building something collapses, the value of it doesn’t collapse along with it. It just moves somewhere else.”
• Umer Farooq: People forget distribution, which matters more than building in the current era. Not everyone can crack it.
• Michał Piszczek: “Tools you build for yourself are the ones that spread. No product spec, just the exact itch.”